This thesis studies how Paraguayan literature about the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870), written in the 1920s, addresses both historical trauma and revisionism by reacting to the prevailing liberal historiography of the war. The thesis analyzes war narratives by three different authors: Cuentos y Parábolas by J. Natalicio González (1922), Tradiciones del Hogar by Teresa Lamas Carísimo Rodríguez de Alcalá (1921, 1928), and Don Inca by Ercilia López de Blomberg (1920). I argue that González, an intellectual and conservative politician, employs horror and gothic to portray the “past as present” and also rectifies the image of (Mariscal) Francisco Solano López. In contrast, Lamas Carísimo’s narratives from family testimonies in oral history portray how silence transmits intergenerational trauma and herald the war roles of women. Finally, López de Blomberg’s novel is analyzed from the overwhelming presence of melancholia and how sadness impacts an upper-class family that confronts death and political instability. A niece of Mariscal López who lived in exile after her father was condemned as a traitor, she is especially concerned with treason and truth in the atrocities of Mariscal López’s military court called “el Tribunal de Sangre.” With the assistance of trauma theory (Freud 1917, Kristeva 1989, Caruth 1996, Danieli 1998, Mucci 2013 et al.) and an analysis of the three authors’ diverse manifestations of historical trauma, I conclude that their works express the wounds of a devastating war of defeat, offering potential healing in narration and new insights into the lingering grief and memories of a war that never really ends.
Read
